...If Indians had held up, we'd have been the slaves...
True. From 1503 African slaves were being sent into the New World by
Spain for the express purpose of substituting their labor in the place of that of the "less hardy" natives of America who couldn't "hold up." (euphemisms that an escaped native-American could easily stay escaped, survive well in doing so, well-knowing the geographical and societal landscape of their own native lands and nations).
A
French mercantile corporation was established in 1701, the
Assiento Company, which was contracted to supply the then Spanish-American settlements. The privileges of this company were later transferred to the
English, with Philip V of Spain and Queene Anne each assuming one-quarter of the Company's capital. The contract spelled out importing 140,000 negroes over 33 years.
It is on this basis -- that the legacy Spanish, French, and English settlers in America and their evolved American constituent had been heavily involved in slavery for centuries before the slave South. That's something that today's Confederate apologists trot out in their attempt to ameliorate the "blame" for the kind of chattel slavery that remained in the slave South by 1860. It's the
"Mommy Billy did it too" justification, to push that the CW wasn't about slavery because everyone in the New World had been practicing it. But of course that's to ignore that those of the slave South were the only ones left practicing slavery, and a much more virulent form of it to boot.
This is the kind of information consistently banned from the "other" site, btw.